Why did Japan surrender? (2011)
boston.com
boston.com
The key thing to understand is that nobody was firmly in charge. The 6-member Supreme War Council, with representatives of the Army, Navy, and the civilian government was running the war. They had been operating by consensus, despite severe disagreements. The civilian government was much weaker than the military. (This stemmed from the February 26, 1936 attempted coup. Long story there.) The Japanese army and navy never got along. A strong faction in the Army wanted to continue the war to the bitter end. (They tried a coup against the Emperor on August 14, 1945, just before the surrender, captured the Imperial Palace, and almost succeeded.) War Minister Anami (the Army head on the Supreme War Council) said, after the Hiroshima bomb, "I am convinced that the Americans had only one bomb, after all." After the second bomb was dropped, Anami still wanted to fight on, but the Emperor decided otherwise. Anami committed ritual suicide.
It was a close thing. If Anami had supported the coup, or the coup had succeeded in capturing the NHK radio station or the Emperor himself, the war probably would have continued.
In such settings, I think it makes sense to regard the combination of Soviets and A-bombs as decisive. Most really big events in history have multiple causes.
> Their concern was not so much whether to end the conflict, but how to end it while holding onto territory, avoiding war crimes trials, and preserving the imperial system.
Shows again how leaders think. The factors, probably in order of importance :
1) Holding on to territory : Retaining the power structure itself (I would argue that this is typical of extreme nationalists governments. Our politicians would never sacrifice themselves to save the United States, but the Japanese emperor and other leaders probably would have)
2) Avoiding war crimes trials : Not getting personally convicted (ie. personally remaining in power, this certainly seems a consideration of US politicians)
3) Preserving the imperial system : Retaining the power of the system over it's territory/subjects
Safety and welfare of their subjects isn't even mentioned.
August 7:
1. Japanese nuclear scientists determine that the bomb was indeed nuclear device.
2. Imperial Navy estimates that US has only one or two more bombs and Japan could endure the attacks.
August 9:
1. bombing of Nagasaki
2. USSR declares war to Japan & Manchurian Strategic Offensive started.
3. Hirohito worried because USSR declared war and held an Imperial conference that authorized minister Tōgō to surrender with only one condition: status of the Emperor must be preserved.
August 15: Japan Surrenders
Even after Hirohito made the personal decision to surrender, the intention was to continue the war if the kokutai (Imperial institution and national polity) would not be preserved.
And here's where I don't understand the reasoning: Did they seriously think the kokutai would have been preserved if they had fought on? Did they seriously think the Allies would have allowed Japan to continue as it had? It seems the most obvious thing in the world to blockade and bombard the Home Islands for six to eight months, destroying farmland especially, and then engage in the beachhead assault that had already been planned.
The American Armed Forces are still using Purple Hearts made specifically for the invasion of the Japanese Home Islands. They're all new-old stock, to use the common phrase; that's how serious the plan was.
Those planning Operation Downfall, the overall one to capture the home islands (well, the regime would fell after the 2nd invasion of the main island), who didn't know about the Manhattan Project were planning to make liberal use of chemical weapons. Those who did ... well, if the 2nd bomb failed, there's a very good chance future production would be reserved for Olympic, with up to 8 of them being used....
As for their strategy, they started the war with an assumption that we weren't tough enough to see it through. It's said that the truth didn't sink into the IJNavy until we lost 2 Rear Admirals (2 stars) in a single night action off of Guadalcanal, in a body of water that earned the name Ironbottom Sound, so many USN and IJN ships were sunk there.
So when it came to the home islands, they hoped they could make it expensive enough we'd give up before the regime fell. Even after we'd firebombed all their major urban centers minus Kyoto (politically critical for the Emperor) and the 4 a-bomb targets and alternates....
It's a very good thing for the world everything came together in that August and they surrendered. And if I had a time machine, I'd never ever try to change anything in history going up to that point, the horror of those a-bombs, even if each caused less loss of life than the first Tokyo firebombing (in only it and one other attack did everything come together including the weather and winds).
I would feel a lot more secure in the efficacy of MAD if war was rational in the first place. History shows it is anything but.
It hasn't even been 100 years since the last nuclear weapon was used offensively, but already the world has come dangerously close to starting a nuclear war.
Numerous accidents involving nuclear weapons have happened. Critical and very dangerous errors were made in detecting that nuclear war had already begun when it hadn't. Countries with nuclear weapons have come close to going to war with each other (India and Pakistan, Cuban Missile Crisis). Weapon-grade nuclear material and nuclear weapons have gone missing. The American nuclear weapon launch codes were all 0's for something like 20 years.
It is an open question how a nuclear power will react to having a nuclear weapon exploded on their soil (potentially by terrorists under a false-flag operation) but it likely won't be a calm and measured response against the perceived perpetrator. If this happens in a poweder-keg like the Middle East, the ensuing chaos could easily draw in other nuclear powers.
Crumbling nuclear-weapons and launch-detection infrastructure in the former Soviet republics is still a major concern because of continued and increasing potential for accidental launches of weapons still aimed at their former Cold War foes, not to mention the renewed possibility of a second Cold War that has been in the news recently, and Putin's overt threats of the use of nuclear weapons.
The Soviets never bought into it, and rightly judged us to be utterly evil to target their children in their homes instead of military targets like we'd done prior the the early '60s.
As you implicitly note, we can be sure nuclear weapons will again be used in anger. Although the dangers from a false flag operation are potentially less than you think, in that each weapon has a radioisotope signature which tells you everything from its design to where the fissionable materials came from. So we'd know who manufactured it, or so I gather and believe from my study of all this (born when Eisenhower was still president, I'm a child of the cold war with e.g. my mother's Civil Defense Block Mother sign a dozen feet from me).
If country A has 100 soldiers while country B has 20 soldiers, even if the cost of war is a 2 to 1 loss in soldiers, war would result in the absolute power of country A.
In a conflict between two countries with nuclear weaponry, the core logic is the same, but the paradigm is different. Nuclear warfare can erase both countries off the face of the earth. This follows from the fact that to combat nuclear attacks, countries started adopting hair-string triggers to destroy the adversary before they can send more warheads their way... except now every country is doing the same thing. In this case, forget the relative nonsense, anyway you cut it, nuclear warfare is not rational for countries because it will end their survival.
My belief is that MAD is sound. And my underlying assumption is that countries tend to think rationally when dealing with international relations. Regardless of leadership, countries do whats best for them an overwhelming majority of the time. Case in point, how often has the U.S. (the bastion of freedom) voluntarily helped countries/people when the U.S.' interests were not directly involved? Also, observe how a seemingly crazy country like North Korea plays the game shrewdly by varying is strategy depending on its adversary.
I agree that there is a threat that nuclear weapons will get in the wrong hands and, in that case, I think its more than probable that disaster would ensue. But the safety and standards for handling infrastructure degradation has improved significantly since the early days of nuclear weapons (when many were lost to the ocean and never recovered) . As for Putin's threats, its nothing a good back and forth of denouncing and condemning can't fix.
The writer stupidly jumps from the idea that if nukes have less than a major impact then they have no impact. Does anyone think the UK or USSR would not have surrendered if the Germans had nukes?
If the US had today's nukes on 8 Dec 1941 the war would not have lasted nearly as long. Every island stronghold, port, airfield, city and fleet would have been taken out early. the remnants would have been mopped up by the Marines.
I just was reading about this [1]. Unguided weapons miss their targets, almost always. As a result you need to mass together and fire large numbers of them to hit even one target with any reliability. Also, because of the large numbers needed and the need to fire them near the target (because accuracy decreases as distance increases), they become a valuable target, vulnerable to the enemy.
Nuclear weapons solved these problems (with a some serious drawbacks). One weapon will do the job, and its blast area is so large that accuracy is unimportant.
(Modern guided weapons also solve many of these problems).
> But therein lies the weakness of the Hasegawa interpretation as well, Bernstein says. After a long war and in the space of a few days, the Japanese leadership was hit with two extraordinary events - Hiroshima and the Soviet invasion - and sorting out cause and effect, based on incomplete documentation, may prove impossible.
There's something else barely examined in the article as well (beyond 2 sentences). I would imagine that totalitarian governments will behave differently from democratic republics when their own people are dying.
Article also gives the example of UK not giving up after German bombing in WW2.
This does not always mean surrender; think Napoleon's invasion of Russia. The difference for Russia in my opinion is that they had a large homogeneous land mass upon which to move and maintain their administration.
Similar reasons cost Napoleon dearly ~130 years before.
Also, Stalin's massive ego wouldn't allow a city named after himself to be taken by the Germans. That's the primary reason that particular city suffered the high casualties that it did. Stalin once told Churchill at the Tehran Conference that "when one man dies it is a tragedy, when thousands die it's statistics."[1]
[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=8fp1A2s6aQwC&pg=PA510&dq#v=...
Would America surrender if we were essentially defeated, blockaded, and the enemy were bombing our cities with impunity? Of course we would.
It isn't like America just snuck two nukes into Japan. It had totally defeated the Imperial Navy and was essentially bombing Japan without any resistance.
The comparison between Japan in August 45 and UK during the Blitz is just stupid.
Even if the Soviet attack was the last straw, it was only a straw. They were trying to use the Soviets to negotiate a better peace and it failed. This is like blaming your QB for missing the Hail Mary for losing the game. It was the first 59 minutes of game that caused you to lose.
People online (not real historians) like to hype this up to bandwagon the "US didn't win WWII, the USSR did" mythology. The truth is it was a huge combined effort.
Depriving the Japanese of oil was an early and effective tactic of the American Navy in the Pacific. The Japanese made a faulty assumption that they could defend supply lines from the Southern Zone to the Japan. In many ways, this was the downfall of Japanese naval forces in WWII. The Japanese also didn't realize that the US and Britain had long since cracked their codes, both military and diplomatic, and even when the Germans told the Japanese their codes had been compromised, they refused to believe it!
Quoting from Daniel Yergin's The Prize:
> Of Japan's total wartime steel merchant shipping, some 86 percent was sunk during the conflict and another 9 percent so seriously damaged as to be out of action by the time the war ended.
The Allies were sinking Japanese oil tankers faster than the Japanese could build new ones!
Japanese defeat in WWII can't be assigned to any single cause, but the vastly superior supply chain of the US Navy in the Pacific and the enormous petroleum production capabilities of America is surely up there.
With that in mind, that makes world wars considerably more commonplace. Given the timing between the six world wars, we're in a definite lull. Nuclear deterrence is likely the major reason for that.
Echoing your point, the Napoleonic Wars ended 99 years before the start of WWI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Waterloo The precursor wars which very much were an input into WWI ended less than 45 years before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Prussian_War (and I'm in the camp that primarily blames France for initiating WWI).
It appears to have worked.
Furthermore, much of the rhetoric about the Jews sounded awfully much like the current rhetoric about the rich, the banksters, the international finance, the 1%, etc.
Other things we usually don't hear about is how scary Socialism was in Germany from, say, 1917 to 1933. Have you heard about the Bavarian Soviet Republic, for example?
Aside from cursory school classes and then some reading, I've never really looked into it in great detail.
The elementary school version is "tanks broke the stalemate, and the US/UK rolled through to victory", but it was a lot more nuanced than that, with internal revolutions in multiple countries. WW1 clearly could have kept going for some extended period longer than it did.
Large German units started surrendering to small Allied forces. Yes, tanks and the U.S. arrival helped clinch everything. But the meltdown inside Germany was quite amazing. Think of the U.S.'s final decision in 1973-75 to get out of Vietnam no matter what. And then multiply that breakdown of the warrior mentality by 100.
The Kaiser lost control of his country in the war's final weeks, and the German authorities naively hoped that they would get an OK armistice/settlement if they called it quits. When they didn't, that created such deep German resentment over the next 20 years that a resumption of the war became inevitable.
Bismarck predicted:
"Jena came twenty years after the death of Frederick the Great; the crash will come twenty years after my departure if things go on like this"
"One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_von_Bismarck#Forced_to_res...
The real lesson from tanks is the impression on the German psyche which led to Manstein, Guderian and Rommel, the concept of Blitzkreig and the fall of France in 1940. Post war tank warfare on the allied side was (generally) very staid comapred to German thinking. Though there were some good thinkers, included Liddell-Hart who showed you could take tanks through the Ardennes...
WW1 ended because Germany exhausted herself utterly in the failed Spring offensive of 1918. The UK's blockade of Germany was having horrific consequences on the home front. Meanwhile the advances that were made in Spring 1918 by Germans led to them capturing lots of supplies from the newly entered USA, thus undermining their morale further.
He was an idiot. There is no such thing as "Blitzkrieg", just dumb luck and huge mistakes on the French's part.
Pershing being a West Pointer, noted that there was no decisive victory on land in WWI and that it would be resumed in a generation. Remarkable prediction.
— Hirohito, August 14,1945
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vdqHpr...
Another aspect not covered in the OP is the efficiency of US nukes. Much/most of the damage done was not from the bombs. If you measure damage through the heat energy released, most came from the burning of the cities rather from the fission in the bomb itself. The firebombing of a city releases as much energy as a nuclear explosion, doing a comparable amount of damage. At the time, a firebombing raid required fewer resources than a nuke. So, from an energy standpoint, the nukes were not an economical means of destroying Japanese cities.
Why then were they used? Why were they used in the pacific and not in europe? (Insert massive screaming rants here.)
We don't know whether atomic bombs would have been used on, say, Berlin or the Ruhr area (maybe even tactically, to speed up the allied advance in the west), but I think the USA would have used one, if only to send a message to the soviets.
The timelines, the actual dates that the bombs became available, are a little secondary imho as this was a multi-year developmental program. I still doubt they would have dropped a bomb on germany for a variety of reasons both technological and sociological.
There is also strong evidence that Stalin wanted to get to berlin first to grab some of the German nuclear materiel in Berlin
US bombing in Germany was designed to specifically attack industry. They flew during daytime, despite that leading to much higher causalities among their crews, and used bomb targets.
It was the UK that firebombed Dresden during night without bothering to aim at specific targets. The British always flew night raids and just aimed to cause carnage.
American policy on the Western campaign didn't target civilians. They used precision bombing (what it was called at the time, it wasn't very precise) to target real targets.
Yet, the policy against Japan ended up much different. At the beginning precision bombing was attempted. But by 1945 they started to resort to firebombing entire cities.
I wonder if there was a racial aspect to it. A lot of Americans consider themselves ethnically German.
The USAAF conducted firebombing of German cities, notably Hamburg.